


a more rational burning

by sea_changed (foxlives)



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Multi, Pre-Series, Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 20:46:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11321421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/sea_changed
Summary: She had understood this as her role from the beginning, the head to Thomas's heart and James's hands.





	a more rational burning

**Author's Note:**

> Miranda on the windowseat.

The rain runs heavy down the window and the book is just as heavy in her hands; a weight like the weight that has settled in her stomach, certain, and aching.

She understands now something that she feels as if she has known for a long while, that she has kept below the surface of her understanding because she has not needed to understand it, and because she knew somehow that the understanding of it would be a blow, straight and certain, to her heart. She and Thomas have, perhaps from the beginning, but certainly by now, seen their marriage very differently, or taken different things from the same seeing: that the two of them together are something solid, something known, the edges of themselves and how they fit together mapped as the coastline of a country they have long lived in. This is something Miranda has always longed for, that kind of knowing, a steady understandable thing. A home; a solution. 

But Thomas has never been comfortable in any place he has been told to call home; he has never been any hand at mathematics. Thomas does not want to be able to see the edges of his love, does not want a map of his desires, or thoughts, or feelings. At some point in the last ten years the two of them, _Thomas and Miranda_ , had become certain, a known quantity, an elegant equation. Part of Miranda wants to identify that moment, to understand when it occurred, but the larger, wounded, sharp part of her does not; does not want to be able to see, clear-eyed, the moment when her husband started falling out of love with her.

Perhaps, she thinks to herself charitably, she had simply never had the opportunity to realize this before: it is not that she lied to herself, kept her mind hidden from herself in a sort of selfish preservation instinct, but that it had simply not been made clear. She and Thomas had always spoken to each other of their affairs with the same frankness, often the same gentle derision: _he's very sweet_ , she would say defensively of a lover, or, _he's not_ that _bad_ , Thomas would say, rolling his eyes. Always with a smile at their lips, a joke shared between them: _they're all right_ , as if to say, _but of course they're not_ you.

They had never spoken of James in that way. Even when he was Miranda's, still, and not Thomas's; even when he had seemed to be for a sparkling span of months both of theirs; even when he had clearly become Thomas's alone, in some nigh-unexplainable way. He had never been presumed inconsequential, something about him so constant, so steady, that they had never spoken of him under the presumption that he would one day be gone from their lives. 

For all that certainty, however, the solid line of his shoulders and the way he makes people turn to look at him as soon as he steps into a room, there is something wild in him: in the way he kisses Miranda like he is drowning, or trying very hard not to; in the way he looks at the both of them like he wants to devour them. In the way he looks at Thomas now like he would do anything for him, and how that kind of promise, in the scarred capable hands of someone like him, is a terrifying thing. 

Thomas wants to love like that, to be loved like that. He does not want a mapped and charted love, an explainable love. _An intelligible flame_ , Miranda thinks, and pushes her thumb against the band of her wedding ring, pressing the engraved words against her skin. She chokes a little on the thought, not sure if it's a sob or a laugh that aches in her throat. If asked, twelve years ago when she had allowed him to put that ring on her finger, even ten months ago, when James had first walked into their lives and Miranda had still thought she'd understood so much, she would have said it was Thomas who understood clear-eyed what he wanted, always, that it was her who was uncertain. Thomas had always seemed so absolutely confident in his wants: she remembers they way he had asked her to marry him, remembers the calm certain way he had told her he loved men as well; the way she had marveled at both. How steady he was in his own desires.

Now, she thinks, she had been wrong about both of them all along. Thomas had not truly wanted what he thought he'd wanted from her, did not want an intelligible flame: he wanted to be lost in love, let it consume him. She had not, in turn, been trying to find something that seemed eternally beyond her, just past her fingertips: she had wanted something wholly findable, wanted something she already had. In the end she had been the steady one, he the one out to sea. That she had them wrong all this time would seem unforgivable, except that after everything she still knows enough to know that Thomas had thought the same. They were united even in this, their fundamental misunderstanding of who they were together.

But now she sees. Understands them together, and understands too what has finally separated them. They make sense together, but Thomas does not want sense; they have always had a kind of logic to them, a symmetry, but Thomas does not want what can be explained part by part, that can be drawn and redrawn steady-handed. She understands now, and she does not have it in herself to look away from this revelation, to try and cheat her own mind by pretending that it has not given up to her a plain, obvious truth.

("What is truth?" Thomas had asked her once, before he had asked her to marry him but after she knew that he would: They had been lying in bed together, and she had thought him nearly asleep. But she had become used to these sorts of questions from him at the oddest of times, and was perennially willing, even eager, to indulge him an answer, or at least an argument. She knew that he would ask her to marry him, and she had been utterly confident that when he did, she would say no.

"Certainty," she'd said simply. "Something that can be verified, and understood, and known."

"Perhaps," he'd said. 

"Perhaps?" she'd asked, propping her head up on her hand. 

"I suppose that is _a_ truth," Thomas had said. "A kind of truth, rather. But I think there is a greater truth, there must be--a kind of truth you _know_ , even if you don't understand it."

"That is belief," she'd said, "not truth."

He had shaken his head, his hair becoming even more mussed against the pillow. "No," he says. "Something greater than belief. Something you know to be true, even if you don't understand the nature of it, the form."

She had made a humming sound, lying back against the pillows.

"You," he had said, amused, "are humoring me."

"No," she'd said teasingly, "I'm disregarding you. You must learn to tell the difference," and he had laughed, and leaned into her, and kissed her sweet and certain.)

She does not want to understand and does not _not_ want to understand, does not want to draw herself away from them but does not know what she, who wants a love she can understand, she who has never wanted to die for anyone, can do around them anymore. She thinks of the letters James has sent them from Nassau, always perfectly formal, addressed to _My Lord & Madam_ and signed off invariably as _Yr Humble Servant James McGraw_ , always attentive to appearances: but always, she had noticed after the second of them, with a blot of ink next to his signature, as if a few words has been carefully and methodically crossed out. She had figured it out, after a moment, and in their next reply, sprawled across several pages of their alternating handwriting, she had written _All our love_ , and then, when they had each signed their names, had gone back and crossed it out with steady strokes of the pen.

Thomas had looked at her uneasily, but she had not felt a qualm about it, knew it was necessary and knew James would understand anyway. She had understood that as her role from the beginning, the head to Thomas's heart and James's hands. What she had not understood then that her very role in their triumvirate would be the very thing that would draw her apart from it: but she is not sure she can regret it, cannot regret her own nature in favor of a love that was never hers alone. She is equally sure she cannot step back from it, that even if the nature of them has shifted that they need her no less: it is not a comfort, but it is a certainty, however bitter in her throat. 

She smooths her thumb over the book's endpaper, over the words written in Thomas's steady hand, _love_ , and _truest_. She thinks of Thomas saying, so many years ago, _something you know to be true, even if you don't understand the nature of it_. Perhaps there was simply a fundamental truth of each other they had never understood, never needed to understand: that James and Thomas's truth is the same is no one's fault, not even anyone's choice, a simple--well. She smiles, small and wry and sad.

She closes over the cover, and stands up from the windowseat. She sets the book on the table, fingertips brushing across it in a last fleeting touch, and leaves the room.

**Author's Note:**

> The inscription in Miranda's wedding ring ("An intelligible flame") as well as the title are both from Milton.
> 
> I'm on tumblr at [sea-changed](https://sea-changed.tumblr.com/).


End file.
